The organizers tricked me into speaking about “the future of DevOps” – as if I would know. But here is how I think about it. DevOps is just the daily build: it could fail, it could work. Measuring the success of a culture is straightforward: does every individual who wants to belong to it have an incentive to stay? If people want to be part of it and it still provides value, the culture is succeeding.
The interesting framework comes from memetics. A meme – not the internet joke, but the original definition from The Selfish Gene – is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. It is the unit of cultural transmission. Memes survive through three mechanisms: replication (DevOps Weekly, DevOps Cafe are clearly replicators), variation (the “DevOps is a scam” blog posts and the no-ops debate created valuable diversity), and adaptation (rugged DevOps, the Obama campaign hiring DevOps engineers, DevOps school).
When someone tried to trademark DevOps last year, the reason it could not be claimed was precisely because of all the prior art from replication. Nobody could own it because it was everywhere. There is also a third replicator beyond genes and memes: technology itself (temes). Automation, containers, reproducible builds – these are machines helping us replicate, and they spread like viruses too. The key distinction: viruses can be parasites (infrastructure as code sometimes parasitizes shell scripting instead of enhancing it) or mutualists (enhancing fitness for both sides).
To drive the evolution of DevOps: encourage diversity – get different people to talk, not just what we want to hear. Never be dogmatic. Share your story even if it seems like what everyone else does, because that is replication. And adapt to whatever is happening in your environment. You are the copy machine. You are the meme that makes the future of DevOps.
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